Welcome to Thunderdome, a vicious, bloody, no-holds-barred flash fiction contest with a new opportunity to eviscerate your opponents every week. The judges watch the spectacle from on high, and they condemn the weak while raising the worthy into glory. Barbed critiques will tear at your ego but leave you the stronger for it. This is an arena for people who want their words to suffer the cleansing fire.

If you'd rather have your posterior patted, Fanfiction.net is thataway.

Sounds great. How do I start murdering all of you with my writing?

Step 1: Read the prompt post.

Step 2: Read the prompt post again.

Step 3: Post "In!" or some wildly clever variant by the signup deadline. What deadline, you ask? Refer to Steps 1 and 2.

Step 4: Write a story that follows the guidelines laid out in the prompt post (i.e. whatever the judge told you to do, you suppurating tardigrade).

Step 5: Proofread it, for the love of gently caress.

Step 6: Post your story by the submission deadline. What deadline, you ask? Refer to Steps 1 and 2, then stick your head in a blender.

Step 7: Sit back and bask in the agony of the judges who have to read your word vomit.

Once you've posted the story, you're done. No edits. No take-backsies. Edited stories will disqualified. You have climbed aboard the fast train to Shametown, and only the strength of your skill and your effort can keep you from permanent residence there.

The winner of the week ascends the Blood Throne and chooses the next prompt. He must find two souls willing to join him in his torment. This team of three will read the incoming entries and pass judgment upon them, and so ensure the cycle of futile suffering continues.

The loser gets a free avatar!

Snazzy, don't you think?

Oh, God, I've won. What now??

I recommend questioning your life decisions.

Thunderdome's cardinal rule is ius iudicis: judge’s right, judge’s responsibility, judge’s law. The lead judge is lord for the week, but with great power comes great responsibility to not gently caress everything up more than is inevitable. Your first step should be to read this page. Your second should be to post a prompt before the masses flood the thread with impatient, crappy .gifs.

A judge should be prepared to read around 15,000 to 30,000 words in the span between the deadline and Tuesday night. (Wednesday judgments happen, but they're an abomination. The week will have abominations enough without your help.) If you know you won't have time to do this, announce your abdication. Someone else is sure to leap at the chance to make goons' lives hell! A winner who hasn't shown her face by midweek is liable to forfeit the prompt.

The other task of judging is to critique all the non-disqualified entries. Crits are the gears that keep Thunderdome turning and masochists coming back for more, so yes, you really ought to explain to that person with the new losertar just why his story sucks. The ideal crit will offer at least three points of feedback, but you do you.

Finally:

quote:

Three shall be the number of judges, and the number of judges shall be three.

Four shall not judge, nor either shall those judging number two, excepting that thou then include a third.

Five is right out.

The triangulation of opinions and viewpoints works well and delivers more crits to the entrants besides, assuming the judges aren't lazy assholes. Do not judge alone if you can help it.

You plebians simply do not understand my literary greatness.

Keep telling yourself that, sunshine. If you want to discuss the hitherto unrecognized merits of your latest fecal vignette, head over to the Fiction Farm or, for more general questions, to Fiction Advice. This thread is for three things:

Posting stories.

Judging stories.

Critting stories.

Banter isn't strictly part of the mission statement, but the Thunderdome experience wouldn't be the same without it. Pulling someone's pigtails may have consequences, however; refer to the post about brawls below.

Nowhere on that list is "whining about stories" for the excellent reason that no one wants to wade through that sewage.

What else can I do to piss you guys off for reasons whereof Reason knows nothing?

Oh, lots, but here are particular things to avoid:

Prefacing your entries with explanations, excuses, or self-flagellation. Have some bloody dignity.

Editing your submissions. That must bear repeating, because people just can't seem to help themselves.

White-noise shitposts; fine artisanal shitposts may pass muster.

Fanfiction. To quote a previous OP on this matter, FANFICTION IS NEVER OKAY EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU ARE BEING CLEVER BY HIDING THE FANFICTION IN WHAT AT FIRST SEEMS TO BE A SERIOUS STORY FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK I will slap your face into ugly little pieces.

Erotica. Keep your greasy, pathetic attempts to turn on something other than your computer out of this thread. You can be disqualified for fanfic or erotica whether a judge explicitly forbids them or not.

quote:

kayfabe /ˈkeɪfeɪb/ is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true," specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or pre-determined nature. Kayfabe has also evolved to become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the realm of the general public

Thunderdome was born in a storm of sass and swagger, and the freedom to go all out in critiques, guns blazing, is what keeps it from devolving into the sort of worthless hugbox we all know and hate. That said, showmanship is one thing; being a fuckstick is another. Don't be a fuckstick.

Putting a quote tag anywhere, anywhere in your goddamn story, because there is no eternal penance sufficiently severe for the despair you would thus wreak you absolute irredeemable rear end in a top hat. (It makes archiving hard, okay? Judges can DQ you for this one, too. Quoting a prompt assignment above your title is fine.)

Failing every damned week you enter. If you enter and then fail to submit a story, you should yourself on your next entry to castrate your abhorrence before it can breed.

Ignorance of rules explicitly mentioned in this here OP.

Anything else I should know?

The word count is a hard maximum. The deadlines are absolute. Mercy is at the judges' discretion. Complain to mods about Thunderdome judgment at the peril of being derided for as long as goons remember that dumb thing you did, which is to say forever.

Our channel on SynIRC, #thunderdome, is a place for participants to hang out and talk about their work in real time. Pop in with questions if you have them, and once you've spilled blood in our combat arena you're welcome to stay a while.

brawling what so someone said something mean and your bottom lip is doing that quivery thing and you feel like you can't go a single second more without punching a motherfucker? thunderdome has just the thing.

you can't fight here it's the Thunderdome when two people hate each other very much, and one of them is you, you get to slap down a challenge. make it big, make it brassy; you're slapping your sex bits down on the bar, try and make 'em bounce a little.

help someone's slapped me with something help accepting brawl challenges isn't required, but if you like to sling the poo poo around (and you should) then failing to back up your bad words with good ones will be remembered.

how does it work? once you've thrown down a challenge, and had it accepted, a brawl judge will step up just like that weird bartender in The Shining. they'll give you a prompt, a word count and a deadline. they'll also, and this is real important, state the this means if you fail to submit by the deadline then you get banned. the judge doesn't need to give you an extension.

what do you mean banned brawl toxxes are obligatory. if you're actually a literal secret agent and you've just discovered you're parachuting into Syria in two hours time then get on irc, snivel at your judge and maybe they'll remove the from the prompt, but expect that to be a one-time mercy if you gently caress it up.

anything else? don't challenge anyone until you've done a few rounds, good grudges take time to fester, don't step up to judge a brawl unless you've at least got an HM or the participants have asked you to, and declining a random drive-by brawl is more acceptable than one with a grudge behind it. this place runs on words, and hatred, and you gotta fuel the fire

Once upon a time, two Thunderdome veterans who shared a love of statistics and a touch of OCD conceived of the greatest project ever imagined: the Thunderdome Archive, where everyone's literary shame could be displayed forever. crabrock bought a domain and coded his visions into reality. Kaishai assisted him by trawling the threads for prompts, stories, and relevant .gifs. To this day, they fight to preserve Thunderdome's coprophilic heritage.

The Archive's purpose is to store the millions of words written for TD to date. If you want to make use of it to the fullest degree (which includes reading the stories), you'll need an account, and you can request one through the link at the top left of the index. Note that accounts are open to participants only! If you're desperate to read about Vorpal Drones and vambraces at sea without searching the threads, you must first shed blood.

The worst thing about authors is that they don’t do enough navel gazing. To that end, a group of courageous and perhaps slightly masochistic TDers pooled their gumption and embarked on a venture to enumerate in audio format the plentiful sins of the dome.

For additional features, please see the Audio Recaps page on the archive! There are several extra features, including the ability to sort through episodes by weeks covered, plus extensive time stamps so you can skip forward to the exact moment we namedrop you.

Your recappers are:

Sitting Here: The idiot they convinced to run this goofball brigade.
Kaishai: The reason that anyone finds these episodes informative.
Ironic Twist: *Audible groan*

Also featuring:
Djeser: Guy who knows a lot of names for penises
Bad Seafood: Sometimes he brings a Ukulele!
...And many more of your favorite domers!

Massive extra thank you to Kaishai for her continuing hard work on making the archive an amazing and comprehensive tool.

Credit to Sebmojo for the theme music.

Sitting Here fucked around with this message at Jan 3, 2018 around 07:03

“It was a dark and stormy night.” Known as one of the cliché opening lines of our time, it's also the first line of the classic novel A Wrinkle in Time. It shows that you can take a bad opening line and still do great things with it.
Did any of you manage to even hint at great things with your humble offerings this week? Let's see. Here are your crits for last week, maggots. Line up.

Aesclepia: Brad Henessey

Initial impressions: Mini time travel via concentration. Someone wants him to knock it off. We never learn who or why. He can't sleep and doesn't know why? I'm not sure I'm fully getting what's going on, so my best guess is that someone implanted a timeskip thing in his head and doesn't want him to use it, and now something's wrong with him and he doesn't know what. He's also very nervous.

After thinking it over: One of the other judges thought the crux of the story was whether or not Brad had cancer. I thought it was that he was doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing. The other judge thought he was mentally ill and imagining everything. In short, your story was not clear on what it was doing. Ambiguity can be fine but I don't think it worked for you here.

Exmond: Vampires Night Out

Initial impressions: Vampires. Well, monsters. Overall you did okay with the first line because it's uttered by a melodramatic character but the story seems a little lacking. We don't know what kinds of monsters things are until the end. As someone who likes monsters to be unique, I felt it was a little lacking, but you didn't exactly have the words to expand on things so I'll let that slide. Daughter out of nowhere was meh.

After thinking it over: It's a very shallow story. The supernatural elements add absolutely nothing, which I thought was a shame.

Jay W. Friks: Letter from a concerned colleague

Initial impressions: First paragraph and everything is already a mess. Interesting story, but I liked the conclusion the most. Not sure how I feel about the story as a whole. It's not bad, but it's not great either.

After thinking it over: A day in the life of an MIB. The ending theory of something bringing fears into reality is the most memorable thing about the story. That core is good, but the execution was lackluster. You needed clarity for more oomph.

Tyrannosaurus: In the Blood

Initial impressions: This resonates with me, that you don't have to believe in religion to do good things and be a good person. That said, the first and last lines seem to be a little forced. I didn't understand what the blood had to do with anything. AIDS, okay, I guess?

After thinking it over: The blood thing doesn't bug me so much, because the core of the story is good enough. It's very believable that someone could lose faith because of someone falling off a pedestal.

apophenium: Gobolinks

Initial impressions: The first line lends itself to a broken mind well. The story is good, the voice(s) interesting. Something about it isn't quite clicking for me, though I'm not sure what.

After thinking it over: I just don't think you can keep blood that fresh red color. The self mutilation as control, okay. The outlet of art, okay. But I just don't know if “treated canvases” would be enough.

Yoruichi: Hope Springs Eternal

Initial impressions: I like it. Dreamy, good description, easily imagined. I relate to Ernest's frustration at being told to do something he doesn't understand. One of my top picks so far.

After thinking it over: I like the use of mundane magic. The Olympics are a good use of form over function, which Ernest has a hard time wrapping his head around. I've got a soft spot for magic and illusions, and you touched it just right. The only thing I don't like is the last line, because that implies he's not just hopeful but outright delusional, and that kinda kills the story.

After thinking it over: Dull. The line “He wanted to feel something else-” is the best thing in it. This is a man who knows he is fearful and boring and wishes idly that he isn't. Unfortunately, the story isn't strong enough to keep that sentiment afloat.

Benny Profane: From Below

Initial impressions: Interesting. Feels kind of disconnected, like it's part of a larger piece.

After thinking about it: You included the flash rule well. It's a bit odd, but didn't completely pull me out of the story. It's well written but the danger rings hollow. Is Asa hoping to get close to her father, hoping he still might love her in some form, or view her as innocent, close enough that she can shank him? I don't believe it.

Thranguy: Beautiful and Terrible As the Dawn

Initial impressions: Off to an interesting start already. It's a confusing piece, but I enjoyed it. The names were very disorienting, and you didn't even have the excuse of being forced to use one by your first line. Which, by the way, made me think that this would be a piece about a newspaper writer or something and then veered off into god-knows-where territory.

After thinking about it: Your worldbuilding is a wreck, and it kills the story. I actually didn't mind the “we” perspective. I'm very forgiving with assuming an author will explain things, but the more I think about this story the less I like it because you take that goodwill and don't deliver.

The Saddest Rhino: “Waste”

Initial impressions: YOU THREW IN A LOSS REFERENCE. This entire piece was a bizarre homage to elisethegreat's placenta chili thread, which was like, okay, and then you threw in a loss reference. Bloody hell. Very meta. Not bad, but barely stands on its own two legs. I enjoyed it.

After thinking about it: I don't hate it, but this is a very TD story. It literally won't work anywhere else. The voice is good, though. You took a weird opening and kept up the oddness.

Sham bam bamina!: Floodplain

Initial impressions: Second paragraph and you've already lost my interest by neglecting to proofread. I suppose you did as well as you could with one of the more convoluted sentences; you tried your best to keep the voice the same. The whole story was very quick, very self aware, and I'm not sure that was in its favor.

After thinking about it: It's not that well written. “...who first heeded aloud the water upon the grasses at our feet...”? Really? It feels like you're going for an archaic pattern of speaking and missing pretty badly. You're aiming for a man who has horrible revelation after horrible revelation about himself, but it all lands flat because it sounds like stuff he's known for years. There's no horror in him being lazy, it's just a shrug and “what can you do?” This man doesn't know how to do anything but gently caress up, and he just keeps loving up and loving up like he can't help it and can't be bothered to really try and do anything else.

sebmojo: In Veritas

Initial impressions: This was a good story with a good voice and one of my top picks. I caught one spelling error but it wasn't enough to kill the mood, which was very dreamy and magical-realism-folklore.

After thinking about it: The other judges brought to my attention the tonal inconsistencies. The child cries, then is suddenly very smart and philosophical, then throws a tantrum. Maybe I just like the dragon, who takes these demands and this hubris and literally reduces it all to ash.

Overall, I think more of you succeeded than failed. Good job, Thunderdome. Give yourself a big pat on the back.

We haven't yet recovered from the holidays here at Recap HQ, but Sitting Here dug an episode out from under a pile of champagne bottles and tinsel to tide you over. Recall the good old days of Week 276: Little Man History and Week 277: Rewrite Mashup with us, when men were real men and crabrock should have been scared; strange tides and stranger syntax await you, not to mention important AIDS facts! Suffer in ignorance no longer, because our reading of Jay W. Friks' "Witch Hunt 86'" is an education for one and all.

Edit/Proofread. Read your story out loud to yourself. You'll catch a lot of awkward phrasing that way. You also need to learn how to punctuate dialogue, and please don't be afraid to use 'said' or leave dialogue untagged once and awhile.

Figure out what your story is about, and revise. Huge chunks of your story are bloat. They say the same thing over and over. The story is repetit--okay you get it. You change genres on your reader at the very end of the story with no foreshadowing whatsoever. The conflict was initially a man who is unhappy with himself trying to find a connection; it turns into a conflict about destroying a troll. The former conflict is not properly resolved because the man doesn't really change, and I don't buy their connection. The latter conflict is solved off-screen. This leads to an extremely unsatisfying resolution.

Basically, right now this is a mess of a story, with unlikable characters, genre-shifts, bloat, bad prose, said-bookisms, a missing climax, and proofreading errors. The stuff I've found was just with a single read-through; I imagine I missed plenty, and there's certainly more I could comment on that needs work. However, the only way you're going to get better is by writing more, so you better get on that. You also might try studying how other people write (actual published stories might be better than TD); try copying what they write to give your brain a feel for it, then writing short snippets of your own in their style. Ultimately, though, this is the kind of story I see from people who basically never practice writing, so practice more by entering in next week.